Borders and Bodies Lecture Series 3: The Body is the Promised Land

by Dr. Nicholas Powers

Dr. Nicholas Powers discusses the poetics of return from slave narratives to Wakanda. The theme of homecoming reappears throughout the history of the African Diaspora. In slave narratives, it borrowed the language of the sublime. Today, it is a cinematic reunification with a fictional Afro-Futurist utopia of Wakanda. The overcoming of alienation, framed as an effect of white supremacy terror and internalized racism has been imagined as possible through a metaphoric Blackness. First, it was the body first then later, Africa as its geographic mirror. What is the role of this tradition in today’s crisis of an imploding West and rising fascism? How does it force us to recalibrate the epistemology of the human, inherited from Western philosophy?